Art imitates bloody art
Stephen Graham Jones puts his love of slasher movies to work in ‘My Heart Is a Chainsaw’
In Stephen Graham Jones’ new novel, “My Heart Is a Chainsaw,” teenage outcast Jade Daniels finds comfort in her obsession with slasher horror movies. That’s why she can see trouble brewing in her Idaho hometown with the influx of wealthy people on the island across Indian Lake. As the new residents begin to take over and people start dying, Jade uses her slasher-film expertise to figure out the killer or killers’ next move. Oh, and like just about every young person in a horror film, she warns the adults but they refuse to listen, even as blood starts actually washing up on the shores of Indian Lake.
But the question remains: Has Jade watched so many bargain-bin slasher flicks that they’ve warped her sense of reality? Local law enforcement and her teacher seem to think so; she’s been writing term papers that blend local folklore and the ongoing gentrification and growing racism and sexism in her world with slasher movie logic all semester long.
Jones, the award-winning Blackfeet Native American author of fiction and all-around horror enthusiast, said it was important to share Jade’s essays and term papers not only to help further the plot but to educate readers on the tropes of iconic slasher films like “Halloween,” “Friday the 13th,” “The Burning,” “A Bay of Blood” and “Scream.”
“I have to be teaching about the slashers while also putting them in a slasher, so that’s why I needed Jade to do that for me,” Jones said during a recent phone interview from his Colorado home. “I also felt like the best way to get to know a character is to listen to them talk, and so these ‘Slasher 101’ papers are where Jade gets to talk and she’s not met with expectations or people’s unwillingness to listen. As she’s writing these papers, she feels like she’s at liberty to go as deep as she wants to.”
If he had tried to have Jade explaining all this in dialogue, “it would have been a mouthful.”
Jones put his vast knowledge of horror subgenres to work as he wrote “My Heart Is a Chainsaw,” which arrives in stores Tuesday from Saga Press. He knew he wanted Jade to exist in the same universe where slasher films are a thing, and to be an expert in that field.
“That changed in slashers when ‘Scream’ happened in a world where there was a ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Halloween,’ ” he explained. “For me, it just makes it more real and I wanted to set it in that world and it was nothing but a thrill. It made it feel like all of that homework I had been doing my whole life was suddenly so worth it.”
Though his favorite slasher protagonist is Jason Voorhees from “Friday the 13th,” Jones said, his favorite horror franchise is “Final Destination,” and the best slasher of all time, in his opinion, is Wes
Craven’s 1996 “Scream.”
“It’s just so effective,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it a parody, but it’s parodic. A good parody burns away the fat or excess off the genre so it can be stronger, and ‘Scream’ was being a slasher while also not being a slasher, and I respected that so much.”
There are references to these films throughout the book as Jade grapples with the idea that a slasher film is playing out in her hometown. She also struggles with the fact that, if this were a film, she’d never be the last surviving woman — or a “final girl,” as the genre refers to these characters — in any horror movie because she doesn’t fit the stereotype. A punk rocker from an abusive, broken home, she’s not a traditional beauty, a virgin or White, as the films typically present these women; Jade is the daughter of a Native American man and an absent White mother. She can’t see herself in the role of characters like Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in “Halloween,” Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) in “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in “Scream.”
“The final girl has gotten to be so pure and shining that she’s become an ideal that people can no longer legitimately see themselves being,” Jones said, noting that the genre needs to flip the script a bit on how these characters are portrayed. “She’s like a God above us all. What I really think final girls give us is a model for how to stand up against bullies, but part of that is subscribing to the fact that we could be that final girl. If that mold becomes something we can no longer step into, then how would we ever go up against the bullies? I don’t want to bring the final girl down a notch, but I wanted to blur the edges a bit so more people could see themselves being a final girl.”
Jones said he suspects he knows why there’s been a renewed interest in the slasher genre of late.
“For the last four or five years, every time we turn on the news we see different people in power doing insane, terrible stuff and then just walking away, like, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ ” he said. “That prompts a need for a justice fantasy, which is what slashers are. They propose a world where wrong is punished and so if we can engage in a slasher for two hours or for 300 pages and feel like there is a place where bad people get their comeuppance, we can go back into our real world and maybe hold our eyes open a little while longer.”
That’s also the reason he’s so into comic books. He discovered Spider-Man when he was 12 and he’s gone on to write a few graphic novels, and last year he was part of Marvel’s “Indigenous Voices” books.
“I feel like I identify with Peter Parker’s plight so dearly that he was real to me and it helped me get through a lot,” he said of his connection with the Marvel franchise.
Also last year, Jones won two Bram Stoker Awards in the novel and long fiction categories with “The Only Good Indians” and “Night of the Mannequins,” respectively.
“It’s nuts and super amazing,” he said of the honors. “What’s really cool about ‘Indians’ winning the Stoker and ‘Night of Mannequins’ winning the novella is that I’m the first person to win both novel and novella. But also the person who won the novel award the previous year is Owl Goingback and he’s also Native. So that’s really cool that two Natives won in successive years and I’m fairly certain that hasn’t happened in hardly any awards ever, but definitely not the Stokers.”
While the pandemic stifled creativity for some, Jones said he was as busy as ever as the shutdown, thankfully, didn’t take away his deadlines.
“What it did was take away my excuses,” he said. “In the last 15 months, I’ve easily written as much as I did the previous 15 months, but over the pandemic, I’ve gotten to work in a television writing room and I’ve been hired to adapt scripts for people and I’ve been doing more comic scripts. I was worried the pandemic would change the way I write fiction, but it hasn’t.”